On AI in banking, instant gratification, and the behaviour problem technology keeps decorating instead of solving.
A Note Before We Begin
This is the fourth and final part of my Malaysian Digital Banking series.
Not an industry analysis. Not a research report. Not a consultant’s recommendation.
Semata-mata pemerhatian seorang pengguna.
The Research Finding Nobody Wanted To Hear
When I was doing UX research for a takaful digital startup, no AI involved, no fancy tech stack, I kept finding the same thing in every user interview.
People struggled to pay for takaful. Not because they couldn’t afford it. Not because the product was bad. Because they couldn’t see it working.
A RM20 cup of latte, instant. Visible. Felt immediately. The warmth, taste and the moment of sitting down and exhaling.
RM20 a month for takaful, invisible and intangible. The value only appears when something goes wrong. Which most people hope never happens.
So every month, the RM20 latte wins.
Not because the latte is more valuable. Because the latte is more real.
That finding stayed with me for years. Because it wasn’t really about takaful. It was about the human relationship with money, and how instant gratification shapes every financial decision most people make without knowing it.
The Lane Of Least Resistance
This pattern didn’t start with digital banks.
The finding was consistent across every takaful user interview:
People didn’t prioritise takaful because paying felt like losing. Month after month — contribution goes out, nothing comes back. The product was working exactly as designed. But the user’s relationship with money — I pay, I expect to see a return — made it feel like a drain, not a protection.
So takaful operators found a solution.
Not to the behaviour problem. To the feeling.
They bundled savings on top of contribution. Created takaful + savings plans. Now the customer sees a number growing alongside their contribution. The instant gratification instinct is satisfied. The product feels like it’s working.
But here’s what most customers don’t realise:
If they took the same total amount — contribution plus savings component — and put it into a regular savings account or recurring investment, the financial outcome would be identical. Or better.
The product didn’t change the behaviour. It accommodated it. It dressed normal savings in takaful clothing and called it a solution.
The lane of least resistance. Always.
And digital banks are driving down the same lane.
AI chat doesn’t change the saver’s relationship with money. It accommodates the expectation that banking should feel effortless.
Receipt capture doesn’t build financial discipline. It accommodates the desire to feel organised without the work of being organised.
The investment widget — added in panic when money started leaving for external apps — doesn’t address why the saver didn’t trust the digital bank with their money in the first place.
It just makes the cupcake look more complete.
Sprinkle. Cherry. Savings component on top of contribution.
Different industry. Same lane. Same avoidance of the behaviour problem that was always underneath.
The lane of least resistance is the most expensive road in Malaysian financial services.
Because every time you take it — the behaviour problem compounds.
And the next product has to accommodate even more.
Then I Downloaded Ryt Bank
Ryt Bank claims to be the world’s first digital bank to use AI.
I downloaded it to claim referral points. Exactly the kind of behaviour The Sampling Error warned about, downloading for the incentive, not the product.
I explored the app properly. The AI chat that executes transfers through conversation. The receipt capture that photographs and categorises your spending automatically. Clean interface. Thoughtful design.
Genuinely impressive. For about five minutes.
Then the research finding came back.
This is sprinkle and cherry on top of a beautiful cupcake.
Not because the technology is bad. The technology is real. It works.
But because it’s solving the wrong problem.
The Wrong Problem — Again
The AI chat reduces the friction of doing a transfer.
But the Malaysian bank user’s relationship with money was never about transfer friction.
The receipt capture makes expense tracking easier.
But the Malaysian saver’s reluctance to trust a digital-only institution with their savings was never about expense tracking.
The cupcake is beautifully decorated.
But nobody asked whether the cupcake itself was what the customer needed.
What The Takaful Research Actually Showed
Here’s what I learned from sitting with real Malaysian users talking about their financial decisions:
The problem was never the product. The problem was visibility.
When you can see the value, you pay willingly. Even RM20 for coffee.
When the value is deferred, when it only appears in a moment of crisis you’re hoping to avoid, the brain categorises it as a loss. Every month. Repeatedly.
That’s why takaful penetration in Malaysia remains stubbornly low despite decades of awareness campaigns, product improvements, and now — digital interfaces.
The campaign didn’t fail. The product didn’t fail.
The instant gratification problem was never addressed.
And now digital banks are making the same mistake.
They’re adding AI to reduce interface friction. Because interface friction is measurable, solvable, and impressive to demonstrate at a product launch.
The real friction are behavioural, psychological, cultural — you can’t demo that. You can’t show it in a press release. You can’t put it in an investor deck.
So they put sprinkles on the cupcake instead.
The Consistent Pattern Across Four Briefings
This is the fourth time I’ve written about Malaysian digital banking. And the same root problem keeps surfacing in different forms.
Part 1 — The Values Collision The Malaysian saver’s identity was built around protecting money. Digital banking was built around moving it.
Part 2 — The Sampling Error They measured eWallet downloads during a pandemic and called it banking readiness.
Part 3 — Nobody Cares About Your DAU They optimised for daily engagement in a product that — if working properly — shouldn’t need daily engagement.
Part 4 — The AI Cupcake They added AI to reduce interface friction in a product whose real barrier was never the interface.
Four different symptoms. One diagnosis:
Malaysian digital banks — and Malaysian financial services more broadly — keep solving the visible problem. The invisible problem — the human relationship with money — remains untouched.
The takaful operator dressed savings in contribution clothing. The digital bank dressed interface in AI clothing. The behaviour underneath — the instant gratification instinct, the need to see money working visibly, the saver’s deep resistance to the intangible — was never addressed.
Just accommodated. Again and again. At increasing cost.
The Question That Should Have Been Asked
I want to be clear about who I am in this conversation.
I’m not an analyst. Not a banking expert. Not a fintech researcher.
I’m the user.
And the user — me, you, every Malaysian who downloaded a digital banking app — is the most important person in the system. The one the bank has the most data about. The one whose every transaction, every pattern, every financial behaviour has been recorded, categorised, and stored.
The bank knows more about my relationship with money than I probably know about myself.
So here’s the question I want to turn back on every Malaysian digital bank right now:
With all that data — with everything you know about how your users actually behave with money — you chose to add AI chat and receipt capture?
BNPL companies understood something the banks haven’t fully acted on. They used psychological insight — the instant gratification problem, the optimism bias, the deferred pain of debt — to design a product that works precisely because it understands human weakness.
Banks have the same psychological data. More of it. Better quality.
And they used it to decorate the interface.
The investment widget that banks recently added — that wasn’t human-centred design. That was panic. They watched money leave their ecosystem to investment apps and scrambled to catch up.
They had the data the whole time.
They just never asked — what does this user actually need from their relationship with money?
Not what feature should we add. Not what friction should we remove.
What does this human actually need?
That question — asked honestly, from the data they already have — would produce something completely different from what Malaysian digital banks are currently building.
The bank has your data.
The question is whether they’re brave enough to use it honestly.
What Would Actually Help
Not AI chat. Not receipt capture. Not personalisation engine.
Something much harder and much less impressive to demonstrate:
Making the value of banking visible. Daily. In a way that connects to how the Malaysian user actually thinks about money.
Not the takaful problem — deferred value in exchange for peace of mind that compounds invisibly.
Not the spending problem — instant gratification over long-term financial health.
But something that makes the act of saving — protecting — building — feel as real and immediate as a RM20 cup of latte on a Tuesday morning.
That’s not a technology problem.
That’s a human understanding problem.
And you cannot solve a human understanding problem with a better interface.
No matter how much AI you pour on top.
No matter how many sprinkles you add to the cupcake.
Here’s what four parts of this series actually revealed:
None of these frictions required technology to solve.
Not one.
The values collision between saving and spending — that’s a human conversation problem. A trust problem. A cultural understanding problem.
The sampling error — that’s a research problem. A question that wasn’t asked honestly before the product was built.
The DAU trap — that’s a metric problem. Measuring the wrong thing because the right thing was too hard to measure.
The AI cupcake — that’s a distraction problem. Solving what’s visible because what’s invisible requires sitting with the user long enough to actually understand them.
Technology didn’t create any of these problems. And technology cannot solve any of them.
But the wave of digital was big. The funding was real. The press releases were impressive. The sprinkles were colourful.
And colourful sprinkles on a beautiful cupcake — from a distance — look exactly like something healthy.
Until you take a bite.
This is not an industry analysis. This is what I observed — as a UX researcher, as a user, and as someone who has been watching how Malaysians relate to money for thirty years.
Draw your own conclusions.
Clarity is the most underrated business investment. — Lokman S., Majalah BIKIN